Facing Airport Security: Affect, Biopolitics, and the Preemptive Securitisation of the Mobile Body

Abstract

This paper explores how the mobile body and, specifically, the face have become a site of observation, calculation, prediction, and action in the process of moving across borders. The paper explores how in the circulatory space of the airport/border, the body's circulatory systems, biological rhythms, and affective expressions have become objects of suspicion—mobile surfaces from which inner thoughts and potentially hostile intentions are scrunitized, read, and given threatening meaning by the newest modes of airport security and surveillance. Examined according to the vectoral modes of historicity and virtual possibility, as well as the internal and external play of intention and feeling, the paper uncovers an increased attention to differential axes of mobility—of past and future, surface and interior. The paper situates these techniques within the preemptive biopolitical securitisation of mobility across borders which, it is argued, has found its referent object in the primal realm of affective capacities.

Anticipating ubiquitous computing: Logics to forecast technological futures

“…Secondly, and notably, there exists a literature on various ways of understanding futurity and particularly anticipation. A small but significant amount of work has been conducted in human geography explicitly on the ways in which futures are and have been figured and attempts have been made to engage with futures (for example : Adey, 2009;Anderson, 2006Anderson, , 2007Anderson, , 2010dBudd and Adey, 2009;Evans, 2010;Kitchin and Kneale, 2001;Kraftl, 2007;Macnaghten, 2010;Pinder, 2001Pinder, , 2005 : Braun, 2005;Harvey, 2000;kinpaisby, 2008;Wolch, 2007).…”

Data, interface, security: Assembling technologies that govern the future

“…A dominant understanding of fire prevailing in the FRS, as the article has evidenced, is as an event that not only sparks spontaneously in the present but is a risk of the future to come. This renegotiation of the understanding of fire as an event has worked to legitimate and engender modes of anticipatory action and intervention which have already been traced in their deployment across a vast set of security organisations (Amoore, 2013, Adey, 2009, Adey and Anderson, 2012, Aradau and Van Munster, 2012, Bonelli and Ragazzi, 2014, de Goede, 2012.…”

“…Acting to articulate fire as a risk, the technologies found in the FRS contribute to an emergent set of governing practices found across an array of institutions, from financial tracking (de Goede, 2012) to border and airport security 4 (Amoore and Hall, 2010, Adey, 2009, Salter, 2013. Digital security devices are harnessed within these organisational contexts to manage risks before their unfolding.…”

Holding together logistical worlds: Friction, seams and circulation in the emerging ‘global warehouse’

“…Studies have addressed how motion creates communities in daily routines (Edensor 2011, Wilson 2011 and binds nations (Verstraete 2002) as well as 'passengering' across multiple modes of transport (Crang and Zhang 2012;Laurier et al 2008;Watts, 2008;Bissell, 2010;Jain, 2011). Since 9/11 there has been an understandable focus on border security and governing people's movement through biometric passenger data (Amoore, 2006;Amoore & de Goede, 2008;Adey, 2009). By contrast, the equivalent flows of freight cargo around the world, or cargo mobilities, have only recently attracted sustained critical attention (Nordstrom, 2007;Cowen, 2010Cowen, , 2014Martin, 2013Martin, , 2014Birtchnell et al 2015), with most accounts focusing on the shipping container, or box.…”